New York City’s project page for “Far West Midtown” (known to the rest of us New Yorkers as either Hell’s Kitchen or Clinton), explaining the opportunities represented by the neighborhood and laying out a framework for development;

a perspective piece from New York Metro, describing the Olympic bid as a catalyst for the development not only of the Railyards, but also of other neglected areas of the five boroughs, all on a scale comparable to Robert Moses’s makeover of the New York metropolitan area;

a Gotham Gazette article that, in part, describes the NYC2012 plan for financing the Hell’s Kitchen redevelopment, Tax Increment Financing (selling bonds that are used to develop the land, and paying them off with the anticipated increase in property values and tax revenue);

The High Line people are going to run into trouble — I’m surprised they’ve gotten this far. Part of it is the presence of DEA and FBI (occupied) buildings around the highline. They don’t want greater public access to their buildings.

The West Chelsea community that is a part of the Highline bugs me, I have to say. Sinking millions into a playground for the upper middle class while there’s a massive women’s jail at the corner of 11th and 20th, various ramshackle housing projects on 26th and 27th streets, and a hideously underfunded and scary city STD clinic just over on 9th Ave.? Misplaced priorities. There’s a massive fiscal crisis in the City and in the nonprofit world and these people are obsessed with making this (toxic) railway yard into a park. The development of West Chelsea in general is unprecedented in New York, and in many ways is unsustainable — greedy eccentric landlords, overpriced luxury housing, a complete lack of building sales, and an inflated rental price per square foot that results in the inability to sustain anything but upscale art galleries.

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Who am I?

I'm Jason Levine, and have been keeping this site since the waning days of 1999. I'm a physician, a husband, a father, a scientist, an uncle, a photographer, and an unapologetic geek. I currently live in Washington, DC, and wear the two hats of a bioinformatics researcher and a clinical pediatric hematologist and oncologist.